BorlandTalk.com

Mark Jacobs · Guest

Quote from Mono developer Miguel de Icaza :-

"We've been using C and C++ way too much - they're nice,

but they're very close to the machine..."

Now listen very carefully, everyone. The plain facts of the matter are that

Borland has been warned off (by whom I don't know, but it smacks of

Micro$haft) supplying application development environments that are

targeted too closely to the machine's architecture. *SURELY* by now, you

developers should be asking why does someone want to scupper attempts at

IDE's for C and C++. There should be a choice of about 5 or 6 major IDEs to

choose from, just for Windows 32-bit by now. But there are really only 2.

Ask yourselves why.

The answer is simple : someone has a vested interest in not allowing even

developers anywhere near the "nuts and bolts" of the machine. Either you

drop to assembler (yikes!) or you go for a less efficient development

paradigm, and one that has been invented by this someone (like .NET or C#

or some other crappy nonsense that lasts all of 5 seconds before it is

revised and everyone pays upgrade fees and redevelops their code to fit the

new frameworks).

If you had done any development work for DDE, found it replaced by ActiveX

and OLE, developed for this, and then found this replaced by .NET,

wouldn't you be rather pi**ed off with the rigmarole? I wouldn't mind, but

DDE and OLE are crap ideas anyway - simply because they had to mirror the

crap design of the underlying OS. (I can still "spy on" keystrokes under

Win XP Pro!!!).

So, the golden rule is "NEVER DEVELOP FOR A TECHNOLOGY THAT IS LESS THAN 3

YEARS OLD". Goodbye .NET - I fail to see any advantage to using Micro$haft

proprietary technologies, just because that's all there is to choose from.

I will invent my own path (and compiler) if necessary. I will make it in

plain C and C++, and layout its design so that the underlying OS is

"shelled out". I will make it as simple as possible so that most OS

platforms are supported, and an add- on library is all that needed to

complete the targeting (a different for each platform). It will be feature-

poor, but allow easy additional libraries to enhance functionality, again

targeted to individual platforms. People have tried too hard in the past

(and unsuccessfully) to invent the golden app dev env which has all the

features and platform independence. No-one has ever come close because it

is an impossible task.

The new development environments are all slow rubbish. Java, C# and .Net,

Visual Basic, ASP, Perl, Python, and SQL, for example, are all much slower

than the equivalent apps in C, C++ or Delphi. It also seems that they don't

want you to be able to use the full potential of your processors. If

someone gave me a car that ran 10 times slower that what I've got, but said

that it had a better future-proof chassis, I would not get, and I would ask

"How do you know the future?".

Here is a very hard Computer Science degree exam question :-

"Design a real-time sound level meter in Java, Visual Basic, or C#". In C++

with MFC under BCB, this is a trivial task, and you can choose through

program design how "real time" it is going to be. Under any of the

question's languages, you will have trouble getting anywhere near

real-time, let alone getting anywhere near the actual bytes of the sound

stream !!!

We should get on with a simple base framework from which everything else

can be bolted on to fit the deployment environment. It should consist of

assembler, C, and C++ code, and have easy access to the underlying machine.

Currently, MFC is what most Win32 developers use to get to the "meat and

veg" of the PC. It should be similar, but we can do a whole lot better.

Come on everyone, I know we can make this - oh, if only I didn't have a

full-time job, and could support my family just developing this.

--

Mark Jacobs

DK Computing

http://www.dkcomputing.co.uk

[email]markj (AT) criticalremovethisspuriousantispamstuff (DOT) co.uk[/email]

R.F. Pels · Guest

Mark Jacobs wrote:

Mark Jacobs · Guest

Here it is :-
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/04/28/interview_with_miguel_de_icaza_cofounder_of_gnome_ximian_and_mono.html

"R.F. Pels" <spamtrap (AT) tiscali (DOT) nl> wrote